Adobe Flash Test Pieces

After learning and trying out Adobe flash for the first time and creating quite a successful first test piece, I wanted to create a better version of it. So I took all the feedback and worked on what people said. People mostly said that I needed to add better textures to everything and possibly try and blend things in a bit more such as the road so it doesn’t stand out so much. So I want back to Photoshop and started from the beginning because I did not want to use anything from the original test piece. I used the same concept which was to simply have a house next to a road and to then animate them.

I took a simple grass texture and just used that as the background for now to see if a grass background would look good. In my opinion it looks better then anything I else I came up with so for my final piece I need to either take pictures of grass until I get a good texture or create a texture by hand that looks similar to the one in my animation below. I would probably have to use sand, or a sponge or simply just create prints of ink on paper until I get a smooth grainy texture with no black splodges. I decided not to have the grass background come towards you in its animation as I found that simply fading it from black to normal or from white to normal, looks pretty good.

I then created the road but used an eraser with low opacity to blend the edges which i think looks quite nice but I am going to get some feedback from tutors and other classmates to see if they have the same opinion or if I should make any changes. I also added a texture to the road but I’m not so happy with the outcome but it will be pretty easy to get a road texture when I come to creating the final animation. I also tested out two different types of animations for the road. One moved across the screen and the other faded in and the fading in one looks far better.

The house has a slightly different design to the previous design but on this new one I also added a roof top texture individually to each side and added shadows to the roof and behind the house to give it more depth and realism. I really like the outcome of the house and I’m probably going to re use it across my test pieces and possibly the final piece but the shadow backdrop still needs more work on it.

The next scene of the animation is the one above and it turned out quite well but there are a few things that need to be refined. I made the roads by taking a screen shot of a google maps view of a part of Kendal. I deleted all the white space and elements apart from the road using the magic wand tool and the eraser tool. I also did not animate the road and the grass background separately which I wish I had and I will do in the next test piece. I used the pen tool within Adobe Flash to create the red line animation. Although you can only draw in straight lines other wise the animation doesn’t follow the path properly. In the next piece I’ll show an example to make that more clear. So every time the line turned a slight angle I would have to create a new layer and an shape tween animation. So for the red line there are 11 layers and separate animations for it.

Overall I am happy with this test piece but its a bit off being what I want it to be. I like the look of the roads but they are still messy and I would like to have a texture and an animation just for the road. I also want to have more going on in the grass area, whether that’s more houses, buildings, more roads or/and a more complicated texture. The next part of the animation will be this street view zooming out to show a map of the UK and then a line showing the distance between Lands End to John O’Groats so I need to find a way to make this current scene fade out smoothly with no clear edges of the map while zooming out to show the UK.